Google CEO Sundar Pichai
PERSONAL INTERNET SECURITY – PART 1
Validation Note: University, Federal, Forensic Researcher and Journalism sources provided in the links below, prove every assertion in this report many times over. A simple web-search by any college-educated person, on the top 5 search engines, can turn up hundreds of additional credible, verifying sources. Expert jury trial and Congressional hearing witnesses have proven these facts over and over.
You probably can't imagine the second-by-second dangers and harms that modern electronics, like your phone and tablet, are causing to your life, your income, your privacy, your beliefs, your human rights, your bank account records, your political data, your job, your brand name, your medical data, your dating life, your reputation and other crucial parts of your life.
Any use of a dating site, Google or Facebook product, social media site, movie site, or anything that you log in to, puts you at substantial risk. Remember: "if it has a plug, it has a bug" . Every electronic device can be easily made to spy on you in ways you cannot possibly imagine.
The Take-Aways:
- Stalkers can find you by zooming in on your pupil reflection
images in your online photos (
https://www.kurzweilai.net/reflected-hidden-faces-in-photographs-revealed-in-pupil
)
- If you send email overseas or make phone calls overseas all
of your communications, and those with anybody else, are NSA
monitored ( https://www.privacytools.io/
)
- Bad guys take a single online photo of you and put it in
software that instantly builds a dossier on you by finding where
every other photo of you is that has ever been posted online (
https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/apples-use-face-recognition-new-iphone
)
- Face-tracking software for stalking you on Match.com and OK
Cupid is more effective than even FBI software for hunting bank
robbers (
https://www.cnet.com/news/clearview-app-lets-strangers-find-your-name-info-with-snap-of-a-photo-report-says/
)
- Any glass, metal or ceramic object near you can be
reflecting your voice or image to digital beam scanners that can
relay your voice or image anywhere in the world
- All your data
from any hotel you stay at will eventually be hacked and leaked (
Info
of
10 MILLION MGM guests including Justin Bieber and TWITTER CEO
leaked online! )
-
Your voting data will be used to spy on you and harm you ( Every
voter
in Israel just had their data leaked in 'grave' security
breach... )
- Lip-reading software can determine
what you are saying from over a mile away (
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/20/russian-police-use-spy-camera-film-opposition-activist-bedroom/
)
- Every Apple iPhone and other smart-phone has over 1000 ways
to bug you, listen to you, track you and record your daily activities
even when you think you have turned off the device. Never leave your
battery in your phone. ( LEAKED
DOCS:
Secretive Market For Your Web History... )(Every
Search.
Every Click. On Every Site… )
-
Elon Musk’s SpaceX StarLink satellites are spy satellites that send
your data to Google and other tech companies (
https://www.chieftain.com/news/20200118/first-drones-now-unexplained-lights-reported-in-horsetooth
)
- Google and Facebook have all of your medical records and
they are part of a political operation (
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hospitals-give-tech-giants-access-to-detailed-medical-records-11579516200
)
- Every dating site, comments section and social media site
sends your private data, covertly, to government, political campaigns
and corporate analysis groups and can also be hacked by anyone.
-
Any hacker can hack ANY network with even a single Intel, Cisco,
Juniper Networks or AMD motherboard on it and nobody can stop them
unless they destroy the motherboard because the back-doors are built
into the hardware. Many of the companies you think are providing
security are secretly owned by the Chinese government spy agencies or
the CIA (
https://boingboing.net/2020/02/11/cia-secretly-owned-worlds-to.html
)
- Warehouses in Nigeria, Russia, Ukraine, Sao Paolo,
China and hundreds of other regions, house tens of thousands of
hackers who work around the clock to try to hack you and manipulate
your data.
- Every red light camera, Walmart/Target/Big Box
camera and every restaurant camera goes off to networks that send
your activities to credit companies, collection companies, political
parties and government agencies ( 'Homeland
Security'
using location data from apps to track millions of
people...
- Match.com, OKCupid
and Plenty of Fish are also DNC voter analysis services that read
your texts and keep your profiles forever
- If you don't put
fake ages, addresses, phone numbers and disposable email addresses on
ANY form you fill out electronically, it will haunt you forever (
https://www.the-sun.com/news/284784/pornstar-data-breach-massive-leak-bank-details/
)
- Every train, plane and cruise line records you constantly
and checks the covert pictures they take of you against global
databases. Corporations grab your collateral private data that those
Princess Cruises and United Airlines companies take and use them to
build files on you ( https://www.silive.com/news/2020/01/report-new-app-can-id-strangers-with-a-single-photo.html
)
- The people who say "nobody would be interested
in me" are the most at risk because their naiveté puts them at
the top-of-the-list for targeting and harvesting (
https://www.cnet.com/news/clearview-app-lets-strangers-find-your-name-info-with-snap-of-a-photo-report-says/
)
- Silicon Valley tech companies don't care about your
rights, they care about enough cash for their executives to buy
hookers and private islands with. Your worst enemy is the social
media CEO. They have a hundred thousand programmers trying to figure
out more and more extreme ways to use your data every day and nobody
to stop them
- The government can see everyplace you went to in
the last year (
https://www.protocol.com/government-buying-location-data
)
There have been over 15,000 different types of hacks used against over 3 billion "average" consumers. EVERY one of them thought they were safes and that nobody would hack them because "nobody cared about them". History has proven every single one of them to have been totally wrong!
If you are smart, and you read the news, you will know that you should ditch all of your electronic devices and "data-poison" any information about you that touches a network by only putting fake info in all conceivable forms and entries on the internet. You, though, may be smart but lazy, like many, and not willing to step outside of the bubble of complacency that corporate advertising has surrounded you with.
Did you know that almost every dating and erotic site sends your most private life experiences and chat messages to Google's and Facebook's investors? https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-google-quietly-tracking-porn-you-watch-2019-7
Do you really want all of those Silicon Valley oligarchs that have been charged with sexual abuse and sex trafficking to know that much about you?
Never, Ever, put your real information on Youtube, Netflix, Linkedin, Google, Twitter, Comcast, Amazon and any similar online service because it absolutely, positively will come back and harm you!
Always remember: Anybody that does not like you can open, read and
take any photo, data, email or text on EVERY phone, computer, network
or electronic device you have ever used no matter how "safe"
you think your personal or work system is! They can do this in less
than a minute. Also: Hundreds of thousands of hackers scan every
device, around the clock, even if they never heard of you, and will
like your stuff just for the fun of causing trouble. Never use an
electronic device unless you encrypt, hide and code your material!
One of the most important safety measures you can take is to review
the security info at: https://www.privacytools.io/
Those
people who think: "I have nothing to worry about..I am not
important" ARE the people who get hacked the most. Don't let
naivete be your downfall. (
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/when-will-we-get-full-truth-about-how-and-why-government-using-facial-recognition
)
All of your info on Target, Safeway, Walgreens has been hacked and
read by many outsiders. NASA, The CIA, The NSA, The White House and
all of the federal background check files have been hacked. The
Department of Energy has been hacked hundreds of times. All of the
dating sites have been hacked and their staff read all of your
messages. Quest labs blood test data and sexual information reports
have been hacked and published to the world. There is no database
that can't be easily hacked. Every computer system with Intel, AMD,
Juniper Networks, Cisco and other hardware in it can be hacked in
seconds with the hardware back-doors soldered onto their electronic
boards. All of the credit reporting bureaus have been hacked. Wells
Fargo bank is constantly hacked. YOU ARE NOT SAFE if you put
information on a network. NO NETWORK is safe! No Silicon Valley
company can, or will, protect your data; mostly because they make
money FROM your data!
Every single modern cell phone and
digital device can be EASILY taken over by any hacker and made to spy
on you, your family, your business and your friends in thousands of
different ways. Taking over the microphone is only a small part of
the ways a phone can be made to spy on you. Your phone can record
your location, you voice vibrations, your mood, your thoughts, your
sexual activity, your finances, your photos, your contacts (who it
then goes off and infects) and a huge number of other things that you
don't want recorded.
Privacy
watchdog
under pressure to recommend facial recognition
ban...
Alarming
Rise
of Smart Camera Networks...
AMAZON's
Ring
Doorbell Secretly Shares Private User Data With FACEBOOK...
The
worst abusers of your privacy, personal information, politics and
psychological information intentions are: Google, Facebook, Linkedin,
Amazon, Netflix, Comcast, AT&T, Xfinity, Match.com & the
other IAC dating sites, Instagram, Uber, Wells Fargo, Twitter,
Paypal, Hulu, Walmart, Target, YouTube, PG&E, The DNC, Media
Matters, Axciom, and their subsidiaries. Never, ever, put accurate
information about yourself on their online form. Never, ever, sign in
to their sites using your real name, phone, address or anything that
could be tracked back to you.
If you don't believe that every government hacks citizens in order to destroy the reputation of anyone who makes a public statement against the current party in power then read the public document at: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP89-01258R000100010002-4.pdf
That document shows you, according to the U.S. Congress, how far things can go.
A program called ACXIX hunts down all of your records from your corner pharmacy, your taxi rides, your concert tickets, your grocery purchases, what time you use energy at your home, your doctor records...and all kinds of little bits of info about you and puts that a file about you. That file about you keeps growing for the rest of your life. That file sucks in other files from other data harvesting sites like Facebook and Google: FOREVER. The information in that file is used to try to control your politics and ideology.
In recent science studies cell phones were proven to exceed
radiation safety limits by as high as 11 times the 2-decade old
allowable U.S. radiation limits when phones touch the body. This is
one of thousands of great reasons to always remove the battery from
your cell phone when you are not talking on it. A phone without a
battery in it can't spy on you and send your data to your
enemies.
If you are reading this notice, the following
data applies to you:
1. EVERY network is known to
contain Intel, Cisco, Juniper Networks, AMD, QualComm and other
hardware which has been proven to contain back-door hard-coded access
to outside parties. This is a proven, inarguable fact based on court
records, FISA data, IT evidence, national news broadcasts,
Congressional presented evidence and inventory records, ie: Krebs On
Security, FireEye, ICIJ, Wikileaks Vault 9, EU, Global IT services,
FBI.
2. Chinese, Russian FSB, Iranian and other
state-sponsored hacking services as well as 14 year old domestic boys
are able to easily enter your networks, emails and digital files
because of this. They can enter your network at any time, with less
than 4 mouse clicks, using software available to anyone. This is a
proven, inarguable fact based on court records, FISA data, IT
evidence and inventory records, ie: Krebs On Security, FireEye, ICIJ,
Wikileaks Vault 9, EU, Global IT services, FBI.
3. Your
financial office is aware of these facts and has chosen not to
replace all of the at-risk equipment, nor sue the manufacturers who
sold your organization this at risk equipment. They believe that the
hassle and cost of replacement and litigation is more effort than the
finance department is willing to undertake. This is a proven,
inarguable fact based on court records, FISA data, IT evidence,
national news broadcasts, Congressional presented evidence and
inventory records, ie: Krebs On Security, FireEye, ICIJ, Wikileaks
Vault 9, EU, Global IT services, FBI.
4. In addition to
the existing tools that were on the internet, in recent years,
foreign hackers have released all of the key hacking software that
the CIA, DIA and NSA built to hack into any device. These software
tools have already been used hundreds of times. Now the entire world
has access to these tools which are freely and openly posted across
the web. This is a proven, inarguable fact based on court records,
FISA data, IT evidence, national news broadcasts, Congressional
presented evidence and inventory records, ie: Krebs On Security,
FireEye, ICIJ, Wikileaks Vault 9, EU, Global IT services, FBI.
5.
The computers, servers, routers, cell phones, IP cameras, IP
microphones, Smart Meters, Tesla’s, “Smart Devices:”, etc. and
other devices openly broadcast their IP data and availability on the
internet. In other words, many of your device broadcast a “HERE I
AM” signal that can be pinged, scanned, spidered, swept or,
otherwise, seen, like a signal-in-the-dark from anywhere on Earth and
from satellites overhead. Your devices announce that they are
available to be hacked, to hackers. This is a proven, inarguable fact
based on court records, FISA data, IT evidence, national news
broadcasts, Congressional presented evidence and inventory records,
ie: Krebs On Security, FireEye, ICIJ, Wikileaks Vault 9, EU, Global
IT services, FBI.
6. It is bad policy for your
organization, or any organization, to think they are immune or have
IT departments that can stop these hacks. NASA, The CIA, The White
House, EQUIFAX, The Department of Energy, Target, Walmart, American
Express, etc. have been hacked hundreds of times. This is a proven,
inarguable fact based on court records, FISA data, IT evidence,
national news broadcasts, Congressional presented evidence and
inventory records, ie: Krebs On Security, FireEye, ICIJ, Wikileaks
Vault 9, EU, Global IT services, FBI.
7. The thinking:
“Well, nobody would want to hack us”, or “We are not important
enough to get hacked” is the most erroneous and negligent thinking
one could have in the world today. Chinese, Russian and Iranian spy
agencies have a global “Facebook for blackmail” and have been
sucking up the data of every entity on Earth for over a decade. If
the network was open, they have the data and are always looking for
more. The same applies to Google and Facebook who have based their
entire business around domestic spying and data re-sale. This is a
proven, inarguable fact based on court records, FISA data, IT
evidence, national news broadcasts, Congressional presented evidence
and inventory records, ie: Krebs On Security, FireEye, ICIJ,
Wikileaks Vault 9, EU, Global IT services, FBI.
8. You are
a “Stepping Stone” doorway to other networks and data for
targeted individuals and other entities. Your networks provide routes
into other people’s networks. The largest political industry today
is called “Doxing” and “Character Assassination”. Billions of
dollars are expended by companies such as IN-Q-Tel - (DNC); Gawker
Media - (DNC); Jalopnik - (DNC); Gizmodo Media - (DNC); K2
Intelligence - (DNC); WikiStrat - (DNC); Podesta Group - (DNC);
Fusion GPS - (DNC/GOP); Google - (DNC); YouTube - (DNC); Alphabet -
(DNC); Facebook - (DNC); Twitter - (DNC); Think Progress - (DNC);
Media Matters - (DNC); Black Cube - (DNC); Mossad - (DNC); Correct
The Record - (DNC); Sand Line - (DNC/GOP); Blackwater - (DNC/GOP);
Stratfor - (DNC/GOP); ShareBlue - (DNC); Wikileaks (DNC/GOP);
Cambridge Analytica - (DNC/GOP); Sid Blumenthal- (DNC); David Brock -
(DNC); PR Firm Sunshine Sachs (DNC); Covington and Burling - (DNC),
Buzzfeed - (DNC) Perkins Coie - (DNC); Wilson Sonsini - (DNC)
and hundreds of others to harm others that they perceive as
political, personal or competitive threats. Do not under-estimate
your unintended role in helping to harm others. This is a proven,
inarguable fact based on court records, FISA data, IT evidence,
national news broadcasts, Congressional presented evidence and
inventory records, ie: Krebs On Security, FireEye, ICIJ, Wikileaks
Vault 9, EU, Global IT services, FBI.
9. NEVER believe
that you are too small to be noticed by hackers. Parties who believe
that are the hackers favorite targets. This is a proven, inarguable
fact based on court records, FISA data, IT evidence, national news
broadcasts, Congressional presented evidence and inventory records,
ie: Krebs On Security, FireEye, ICIJ, Wikileaks Vault 9, EU, Global
IT services, FBI.
10. NEVER believe that because the word
“DELL” or “IBM” or “CISCO” is imprinted on the plastic
cover of some equipment that you are safe. Big brands are targeted by
every spy agency on Earth and are the MOST compromised types of
equipment. This is a proven, inarguable fact based on court records,
FISA data, IT evidence, national news broadcasts, Congressional
presented evidence and inventory records, ie: Krebs On Security,
FireEye, ICIJ, Wikileaks Vault 9, EU, Global IT services, FBI.
11.
YOU may not personally care about getting exposed but the person, or
agency, you allow to get exposed will be affected for the rest of
their lives and they will care very much and could sue you for
destroying them via negligence. Be considerate of others in your
“internet behavior”. Do not put anything that could hurt another
on any network, ever. This is a proven, inarguable fact based on
court records, FISA data, IT evidence, national news broadcasts,
Congressional presented evidence and inventory records, ie: Krebs On
Security, FireEye, ICIJ, Wikileaks Vault 9, EU, Global IT services,
FBI.
12. Never post your real photograph online, or on a
dating site social media or on any network. There are thousands of
groups who scan every photo on the web and cross check those photos
in their massive databases to reveal your personal information via
every other location your photo is posted. These "image
harvesters" can find out where you, who your friends and enemies
are and where your kids are in minutes using comparative image data
that they have automated and operating around the clock. This
is a proven, inarguable fact based on court records, FISA data, IT
evidence, national news broadcasts, Congressional presented evidence
and inventory records, ie: Krebs On Security, FireEye, ICIJ,
Wikileaks Vault 9, EU, Global IT services, FBI.
13. If you
think using web security measures like this makes you "paranoid",
then think again. Cautious and intelligent people use these security
measures because these dangers are proven in the news headlines
daily. Uninformed, naive and low IQ people are the types of people
who do not use good web hygiene and who suffer because they are not
cautious and are not willing to consider the consequences of their
failure to read the news and stay informed.
‘Gotham’ software written by Palantir shows how government agencies, or anybody, can use very little information to obtain quick access to anyone’s personal minutiae.
VICE NEWS Motherboard via public records request has revealed shocking details of capabilities of California law enforcement involved in Fusion Centers, once deemed to be a conspiracy theory like the National Security Agency (NSA) which was founded in 1952, and its existence hidden until the mid-1960s. Even more secretive is the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which was founded in 1960 but remained completely secret for 30 years.
Some of the documents instructing California law enforcement (Northern California Regional Intelligence Center) “Fusion Center” are now online, and they show just how much information the government can quickly access with little or no knowledge of a person of interest.
“The guide doesn’t just show how Gotham works. It also shows how police are instructed to use the software,” writes Caroline Haskins.
“This guide seems to be specifically made by Palantir for the California law enforcement because it includes examples specific to California.”
According to DHS, “Fusion centers operate as state and major urban area focal points for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between federal; state, local, tribal, territorial (SLTT); and private sector partners” like Palantir. Further, Fusion Centers are locally owned and operated, arms of the “intelligence community,” i.e. the 17 intelligence agencies coordinated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). However, sometimes the buildings are staffed by trained NSA personnel like what happened in Mexico City, according to a 2010 Defense Department (DOD) memorandum.
Palantir is a private intelligence data management company mapping relationships between individuals and organizations alike founded by Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp and accused rapist Joe Lonsdale. You may remember Palantir from journalist Barrett Brown, Anonymous’ hack of HBGary, or accusations that the company provided the technology that enables NSA’s mass surveillance PRISM. Founded with early investment from the CIA and heavily used by the military, Palantir is a subcontracting company in its own right. The company has even been featured in the Senate’s grilling of Facebook, when Washington State Senator Maria Cantwell asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Do you know who Palantir is?” due to Peter Thiel sitting on Facebook’s board.
In 2011, Anonymous’ breach exposed HBGary’s plan, conceived along with data intelligence firm Palantir, and Berico Technologies, to retaliate against WikiLeaks with cyber attacks and threaten the journalism institutions supporters. Following the hack and exposure of the joint plot, Palantir attempted to distance itself from HBGary, which it blamed for the plot.
Bank of America/Palintir/HBGary combined WikiLeaks attack plan. You can find more here: https://t.co/85yECxFmZu pic.twitter.com/huNtfJp8gl
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 29, 2016
This was in part because Palantir had in 2011 scored $250 million in deals ; its customers included the CIA, FBI, US Special Operations Command, Army, Marines, Air Force, LAPD and even the NYPD. So the shady contractor had its reputation to lose at the time being involved in arguably criminal activity against WikiLeaks and its supporters.
Palantir describes itself as follows based on its website:
Palantir Law Enforcement supports existing case management systems, evidence management systems, arrest records, warrant data, subpoenaed data, RMS or other crime-reporting data, Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) data, federal repositories, gang intelligence, suspicious activity reports, Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) data, and unstructured data such as document repositories and emails.
Palantir’s software, Bloomberg reports,
combs through disparate data sources—financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings—and searches for connections that human analysts might miss. It then presents the linkages in colorful, easy-to-interpret graphics that look like spider webs.
Motherboard shows how Fusion Center police can now utilize similar technology to track citizens beyond social media and online web accounts with people record searches, vehicle record searches, a Histogram tool, a Map tool, and an Object Explorer tool. (For more information on each and the applicable uses see the Vice News article here.)
Police can then click on an individual in the chart within Gotham and see every personal detail about a target and those around them, from email addresses to bank account information, license information, social media profiles, etc., according to the documents.
Palantir’s software in many ways is similar to the Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) stolen software Main Core and may be the next evolution in that code, which allegedly predated PRISM. In 2008, Salon.com published details about a top-secret government database that might have been at the heart of the Bush administration’s domestic spying operations. The database known as “Main Core” reportedly collected and stored vast amounts of personal and financial data about millions of Americans in event of an emergency like Martial Law.
The only difference is, again, this technology is being allowed to be deployed by Fusion Center designated police and not just the National Security Agency. Therefore, this expands the power that Fusion Center police — consisting of local law enforcement, other local government employees, as well as Department of Homeland Security personnel — have over individual American citizens.
This is a huge leap from allowing NSA agents to access PRISM database search software or being paid by the government to mine social media for “terrorists.”
Fusion Centers have become a long-standing target of civil liberties groups like the EFF, ACLU, and others because they collect and aggregate data from so many different public and private sources.
On a deeper level, when you combine the capabilities of Palantir’s Gotham software, the abuse of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) database for Federal Bureau of Investigations/Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and facial recognition technology, you have the formula for a nightmarish surveillance state. Ironically, or perhaps not, that nightmare is the reality of undocumented immigrants as Palantir is one of several companies helping sift through data for the raids planned by ICE, according to journalist Barrett Brown.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED:
According to the
world's top internet security experts: "...Welcome to the new
digital world. Nobody can ever type anything on the internet without
getting scanned, hacked, privacy abused, data harvested for some
political campaign, spied on by the NSA and Russian hackers and sold
to marketing companies. You can't find a corporate or email server
that has not already been hacked. For $5000.00, on the Dark Web, you
can now buy a copy of any person's entire dating files from
match.com, their social security records and their federal
back-ground checks. These holes can never be patched because they
exist right in the hardware of 90% of the internet hardware on Earth.
Any hacker only needs to find one hole in a network in order to steal
everything in your medical records, your Macy's account, your credit
records and your dating data. Be aware, these days, Mr. & Ms.
Consumer. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon have turned out to be
not-what-they-seem. They manipulate you and your personal information
in quite illicit manners and for corrupt purposes. Avoid
communicating with anybody on the internet because you will never
know who you are really talking to. Only communication with people
live and in-person..."
SPREAD THE WORD. TELL
YOUR FRIENDS. COPY AND PASTE THIS TO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA. SEE MORE
PROOF IN THESE
ARTICLES:
https://www.i-programmer.info/news/149-security/12556-google-says-spectre-and-meltdown-are-too-difficult-to-fix.html
https://sputniknews.com/us/201902231072681117-encryption-keys-dark-overlord-911-hack/
https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-microphone-was-never-supposed-to-be-a-secret-2019-2
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/430779-google-says-hidden-microphone-was-never-intended-to-be-a-secret
https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/71200/smartphone-apps-sending-intensely-personal-information-to-facebook--whether-or-not-you-have-an.html
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-edge-secret-whitelist-allows-facebook-to-autorun-flash/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210727
https://www.davidicke.com/article/469484/israel-hardware-backdoored-everything
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2186606/chinas-social-credit-system-shows-its-teeth-banning-millions
https://youtu.be/lwoyesA-vlM
https://www.zdnet.com/article/critical-vulnerabilities-uncovered-in-popular-password-managers/
https://files.catbox.moe/jopll0.pdf
https://files.catbox.moe/ugqngv.pdf
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612974/once-hailed-as-unhackable-blockchains-are-now-getting-hacked/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/att-t-mobile-sprint-reportedly-broke-us-law-by-selling-911-location-data/
https://theintercept.com/2019/02/08/jeff-bezos-protests-the-invasion-of-his-privacy-as-amazon-builds-a-sprawling-surveillance-state-for-everyone-else/
https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/71200/smartphone-apps-sending-intensely-personal-information-to-facebook--whether-or-not-you-have-an.html
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/feds-share-watch-list-with-1-400-private-groups-1.569308
https://voat.co/v/news/3053329
https://www.zdnet.com/article/all-intel-chips-open-to-new-spoiler-non-spectre-attack-dont-expect-a-quick-fix/
https://voat.co/v/technology/3075724
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/26/malware_ibm_powershell/
https://fossbytes.com/facebook-lets-anyone-view-your-profile-using-your-phone-number/
https://www.iottechtrends.com/vulnerability-ring-doorbell-fixed/
https://voat.co/v/technology/3077896
https://www.mintpressnews.com/whistleblowers-say-nsa-still-spies-american-phones-hidden-program/256208/
https://www.wionews.com/photos/how-israel-spyware-firm-nso-operates-in-shadowy-cyber-world-218782#hit-in-mexico-218759
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/whatsapp-hack-latest-breach-personal-data-security-135037749.html
https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/14/whatsapp-security-attack-put-malicious-code-iphones-androids-9523698/
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9069211/whatsapp-surveillance-cyber-attack-glitch/
----------------------------------------------
THE PROMIS BACKDOOR
Beyond
embedded journalists, news blackouts, false flag events, blacklisted
and disappeared Internet domains the plotline of America's "free
press" there are now ISP-filtering programs subject to Homeland
Security guidelines that sift through emails and toss some into a
black hole. Insiders and the NSA-approved, however, can get around
such protections of networks by means of the various hybrids of the
PROM IS backdoor. The 1980s theA of the Prosecutor's Management
Information System (PROMIS) software handed over the golden key that
would grant most of the world to a handful of criminals. In fact,
this one crime may have been the final deal with the devil that
consigned the United States to its present shameful descent into
moral turpitude. PROMIS began as a COBOL-based program designed to
track multiple offenders through multiple databases like those of the
DOJ, CIA, U.S. Attorney, IRS, etc. Its creator was a former NSA
analyst named William Hamilton. About the time that the October
Surprise Iranian hostage drama was stealing the election for former
California governor Ronald Reagan and former CIA director George H.W.
Bush in 1980, Hamilton was moving his Inslaw Inc. from non-profit to
for-profit status.
His intention was to
keep the upgraded version of PROM IS that Inslaw had paid for and
earmark a public domain version funded by a Law Enforcement
Assistance Administration (LEAA) grant for the government. With
570,000 lines of code, PROMIS was able to integrate innumerable
databases without any reprogramming and thus turn mere data into
information.
With
Reagan in the White House, his California cronies at the DOJ
offered Inslaw a $9.6 million contract to install public-domain
PROMIS in prosecutors' offices, though it was really the enhanced
PROM IS that the good-old-boy network had set its sights on. In
February 1983, the chief of Israeli antiterrorism intelligence was
sent to Inslaw under an alias to see for himself the DEC VAX enhanced
version. He recognized immediately that this software would
revolutionize Israeli intelligence and crush the Palestine Inti fada.
Enhanced PROMIS could extrapolate nuclear submarine routes and
destinations, track assets, trustees, and judges. Not only that, but
the conspirators had a CIA genius named Michael Riconosciuto who
could enhance the enhanced version one step further, once it was in
their possession. To install public domain PROMIS in ninety-four U.S.
Attorney offices as per contract, Inslaw had to utilize its enhanced
PROMIS.
The DOJ made its move, demanding temporary possession of enhanced PROMIS as collateral to ensure that all installations were completed and that only Inslaw money had gone into the enhancements. Na'ively, Hamilton agreed. The rest is history: the DOJ delayed payments on the $9.6 million and drove Inslaw into bankruptcy. With Edwin Meese III as Attorney General, the bankruptcy system was little more than a political patronage system, anyway. The enhanced PROMIS was then passed to the brilliant multivalent computer and chemical genius Riconosciuto, son of CIA Agent Marshall Riconosciuto.5 Recruited at sixteen, Michael had studied with Nobel Prize-winning physicist and co-inventor of the laser Arthur Shallo. Michael was moved from Indio to Silver Springs to Miami as he worked to insert a chip that would broadcast the contents of whatever database was present to collection satellites and monitoring vans like the Google Street View van, using a digital spread spectrum to make the signal look like computer noise. This Trojan horse would grant key-club access to the backdoor of any person or institution that purchased PROM IS software as long as the backdoor could be kept secret. Meanwhile, the drama between Hamilton and the conspirators at DOJ continued. A quiet offer to buy out Inslaw was proffered by the investment banking firm Allen & Co., British publisher (Daily Mirror) Robert Maxwell, the Arkansas corporation Systematics, and Arkansas lawyer (and Clinton family friend) Webb Hubbell.
Hamilton refused and filed a $50 million lawsuit in bankruptcy
court against the DOJ on June 9, 1986. Bankruptcy Judge George F.
Bason, Jr. ruled that the DOJ had indeed stolen PROMIS through
trickery, fraud, and deceit, and awarded Inslaw $6.8 million. He was
unable to bring perjury charges against government officials but
recommended to the House Judiciary Committee that it conduct a full
investigation of the DOJ. The DOJ's appeal failed, but the
Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed everything on a
technicality. Under then-President George H.W. Bush (1989 — 1993),
Inslaw's petition to the Supreme Court in October 1991 was scorned.
When the IRS lawyer requested that Inslaw be liquidated in such a way
that the U.S. Trustee program (AG Meese's feeding trough between the
DOJ and IRS) could name the trustee who would convert the assets,
oversee the auction, and retain the appraisers, Judge Bason
refused.
Under then-President William
Jefferson Clinton (1993 — 2001), the Court of Federal Claims
whitewashed the DOJ's destruction of Inslaw and theA of PROMIS on
July 31, 1997. Judge Christine Miller sent a 186-page advisory
opinion to Congress claiming that Inslaw's complaint had no merit a
somber message to software developers seeking to do business with
Attorney Generals and their DOJ. For his integrity, Judge Bason lost
his bench seat to the IRS lawyer. T
hroughout three administrations, the mainstream Mockingbird media
obediently covered up the Inslaw affair, enhanced PROMIS being a
master tool of inference extraction able to track and eavesdrop like
nothing else. Once enhanced PROMIS was being sold domestically and
abroad so as to steal data from individuals, government agencies,
banks, and corporations everywhere, intelligence-connected Barry
Kumnick~ turned PROMIS into an artificial intelligence (AI) tool
called SMART (Special Management Artificial Reasoning Tool) that
revolutionized surveillance. The DOJ promised Kumnick $25 million,
then forced him into bankruptcy as it had Hamilton. (Unlike Hamilton,
Kumnick settled for a high security clearance and work at military
contractors Systematics and Northrop.) Five Eyes / Echelon and the
FBI's Carnivore / Data Collection System 1000 were promptly armed
with SMART, as was closed circuit satellite highdefinition (HD)
television. With SMART, Five Eyes / Echelon intercepts for UKUSA
agencies became breathtaking.
The next
modification to Hamilton's PROMIS was Brainstorm, a behavioral
recognition software, followed by the facial recognition soAware
Flexible Research System (FRS); then Semantic Web, which looks not
just for link words and embedded code but for what it means that this
particular person is following this particular thread. Then came
quantum modification. The Department of Defense paid Simulex, Inc. to
develop Sentient World Simulation (SWS), a synthetic mirror of the
real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to
current real-world information. The SEAS (Synthetic Environment for
Analysis and Simulations) soAware platform drives SWS to devour as
many as five million nodes of breaking news census data, shiAing
economic indicators, real world weather patterns, and social media
data, then feeds it proprietary military intelligence and fictitious
events to gauge their destabilizing impact. Research into how to
maintain public cognitive dissonance and learned helplessness
(psychologist Martin Seligman) help SEAS deduce human
behavior.
---------------------------------------------------------
There are legitimate reasons ( http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/edward-snowden-surveillance-is-about-power/ )to want to avoid being tracked and spied-on while you're online. But aside from that, doesn't it feel creepy knowing you're probably being watched every moment that you're online and that information about where you go and what you do could potentially be sold to anyone at any time--to advertisers, your health insurance company, a future employer, the government, even a snoopy neighbor? Wouldn't you feel better not having to worry about that on top of everything else you have to worry about every day?
You can test to what extent your browser is transmitting
unique information using these sites: panopticlick.com, Shieldsup,
and ip-check.info.
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
https://www.grc.com/shieldsup
https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/ip-check.info?/lang=en
These
sites confirm that browsers transmit a lot of data that can be used
for fingerprinting. From playing around with these sites, I have
noticed that turning off javascript in my browser does help some.
Also the TOR browser seems to transmit less data than most, but even
it is not completely effective. The added benefit that you get from
the TOR browser and especially the TAILS operating system is that
they block your IP address from the websites you visit. You want to
try several browsers to see which one transmits the least
information. Perhaps you will be lucky enough to find a browser that
transmits less information than the TOR browser.
The next
thing to be aware of is that corporations have methods other than
tracking to spy on you. There is a saying that if a corporation is
offering you their product for free, you are their product. This
means that corporations that offer you free services are selling the
data they collect from you in order to be able to provide you with
these services. So, chances are that companies that provide you with
free email are reading your email. We know that, in addition to
tracking you, Facebook reads your posts and knows who your friends
are, and that is just the beginning of Facebook's spying methods.
Free online surveys are just ways of collecting more data from you.
Companies also monitor your credit card transactions and sell your
online dating profiles. If you have a Samsung TV that is connected to
the internet, it's probably recording what you watch and may even be
listening to your private conversations in your home. In fact,
anything that you have in your home that is connected to the internet
may be spying on you, right down to your internet-connected light
bulb. With a few exceptions, online search engines monitor and log
your searches. One of the exceptions is the ixquick.com search
engine, which is headquartered in Europe. The steps to counter the
nearly ubiquitous activities of free service providers would be to
pay for services you receive online, read website privacy agreements,
and not buy products that are known to be spying on you. However, the
only way to be really secure from corporations using the internet to
spy on you is to never connect to the internet or buy any
internet-connected appliances. Welcome back to the
1980's.
Protecting yourself from government spying while
you are on the internet is the hardest and requires the most
knowledge. The biggest problem is that unless a whistle-blower like
Edward Snowden tells us, we have no way of knowing how governments
may potentially be spying on us. That means that we have no way of
protecting ourselves 100% of the time from government spying. Some
things whistle-blowers have revealed (
https://secureswissdata.com/9-ways-government-spying-on-internet-activity/
) are that the US government logs the meta data from all phone calls
(who calls who and when), secretly forces internet service providers
and providers of other services to allow it to "listen in on"
and record all traffic going through their servers, reads nearly all
email sent from everywhere in the world, and tracks the locations of
all cell phones (even when they're turned off). And, although I am
not aware of any specific whistle-blower revelations on this, there
is every reason to believe that the US government (and perhaps
others, including China's) has backdoors built into all computer
hardware and operating system software for monitoring everything we
do on our cell phones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, and
routers. (
https://www.eteknix.com/nsa-may-backdoors-built-intel-amd-processors/
) See also this. Because Lenovo computers are manufactured in China,
the US government has issued warnings to all US government agencies
and subcontractors to strongly discourage them from using Lenovo
computers. And the US government probably has backdoors (
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-the-nsa-attempting-to-insert-backdoors-into-encrypted-data
) into all commercially-available encryption software, with the
possible exception of Truecrypt version 7.1a. I hope you are
understanding now the magnitude of the lengths that governments are
going to (using your tax money) to spy on you. In truth, we are now
approaching the level of government spying that George Orwell warned
about in his book, 1984
So what can we practically do to
protect ourselves from government spying? Seriously, there isn't
much, if we want to use cell phones, credit cards, and the internet.
About all we can do, if we absolutely need to have a private
conversation, is to have a face-to-face meeting without any
electronics within microphone range. That includes cell phones,
Samsung TV's, video cameras, computers, or land-line telephones. And
don't travel to the meeting place using long-distance commercial
transportation.
Sending a letter through the US mail is the next best, although it
is known that the outsides of all mail sent through the US mail are
photographed, and the pictures are stored. So, don't put your return
address on the envelope. (
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/new_york_times_post_office_photocopies_envelopes_of_all_mail_sent_in_the_us/
) As far as surfing the internet is concerned, begin with all the
precautions that I outlined above to protect yourself from corporate
spying (except HTTPS and VPN's). Then, add the TAILS operating system
on a USB stick. As I said, TAILS will not prevent you from being
identified and tracked via the fingerprinting method. And who can be
sure whether the government has a backdoor in TAILS? As far as I
know, the super-paranoid, hoody and sunglasses method I outlined
above is is the next
step.
-----------------------------------------------
Experts
warns of ‘epidemic’ of bugging devices used by stalkers - By
James Hockaday
Stalkers are using cheap bugging devices
hidden in everyday household items
More funding and legal
powers are needed for police to stop a surge of stalkers using
eavesdropping devices to spy on victims, experts have warned.
Firms
paid to detect the bugs say they’re finding more and more of the
devices which are readily available on online marketplaces like
Amazon and eBay.
Jack Lazzereschi, Technical Director of
bug sweeping company Shapestones, says cases of stalking and victims
being blackmailed with intimate footage shot in secret has doubled in
the past two years.
He told Metro.co.uk: ‘The police
want to do something about it, they try to, but usually they don’t
have the legal power or the resources to investigate.
‘For
us it’s a problem. We try to protect the client, we want to assure
that somebody has been protected.’
Advert for a hidden camera
device planted inside a fire/smoke alarm sold on Amazon
People
are paying as little as £15 for listening devices and spy cameras
hidden inside desk lamps, wall sockets, phone charger cables, USB
sticks and picture frames.
Users insert a sim card into a
hidden slot and call a number to listen in on their unwitting
targets.
People using hidden cameras can watch what’s
happening using an apps on their phones.
Jack says the
devices are so effective, cheap and hard to trace to their users, law
enforcement prefer using them over expensive old-school
devices.
Although every case is different, in situations
where homeowners plant devices in their own properties, Jack says
there’s usually a legal ‘grey area’ to avoid prosecution.
The
devices themselves aren’t illegal and they are usually marketed for
legitimate purposes like protection, making it difficult for cops to
investigate.
There is no suggestion online marketplaces
like eBay and Amazon are breaking the law by selling them.
But
in some instances, images of women in their underwear have been used
in listings – implying more sinister uses for the devices.
Even
in cases when people are more clearly breaking the law, Jack says
it’s unlikely perpetrators will be brought to justice as
overstretched police will prioritise resources to stop violent
crime.
Jack’s says around 60 per cent of his firm’s
non-corporate cases cases involve stalking or blackmail.
He
says it’s become an ‘epidemic’ over the past couple of years
with the gadgets more readily available than ever before.
Jack
Lazzereschi says he’s seen stalking cases double in a few years
Victims are often filmed naked or having sex and
threatened with the threat of footage being put online and in the
worst cases children are also recorded.
Jack says UK law
is woefully unprepared to deal with these devices compared to
countries in the Asian-Pacific region.
In South Korea
authorities have cracked down on a scourge of perverts planting
cameras in public toilets.
James Williams, director of bug
sweepers QCC Global says snooping devices used to be the preserve of
people with deep pockets and technological know-how.
He
said: ‘It’s gone from that to really being at a place where
anybody can just buy a device from the internet.
‘Anything
you can possibly think of you can buy with a bug built into it. I
would say they’re getting used increasingly across the
board.’
Suky Bhaker, Acting CEO of the Suzy Lamplugh
Trust, which runs the National Stalking Helpline, warned using these
gadgets could be a prelude to physical violence.
She said:
‘We know that stalking and coercive control are extremely dangerous
and can cause huge harm to the victim, both in terms of their
psychological wellbeing and the potential for escalation to physical
violence or even murder.
‘The use of surveillance
devices or spyware apps by stalkers, must be seen in the context of a
pattern of obsessive, fixated behaviour which aims at controlling and
monitoring the victim.
She added: ‘There should be clarity for police forces that the
use of surveillance equipment by stalkers to monitor their victim’s
location or communications is a sign that serious and dangerous abuse
may be present or imminent.’
‘All cases of stalking or
coercive control should be taken seriously and investigated when
reported to police.’
The charity is calling for all
police forces across the country to train staff in this
area.
Earlier this month a policeman known only by his
surname Mills was barred from the profession for life for repeatedly
dismissing pleas for help from 19-year-old Shana Grice who was
eventually murdered by her stalker ex-boyfriend Michel Lane.
A
spokesman for eBay said: ‘The listing of mini cameras on eBay is
permitted for legitimate items like baby monitors or doorbell
cameras.
‘However, items intended to be used as spying
devices are banned from eBay’s UK platform in accordance with the
law and our policy.
‘We have filters in place to block
prohibited items, and all the items flagged by Metro have now been
removed.’
Face-tracking harvesters grab one picture of
you and then use AI to find every other digital picture of you on
Earth and open every social media post, resume, news clipping, dating
account etc. and sell the full dossier on you to Axciom, the NSA,
Political manipulators etc. and hack your bank accounts and credit
cards. Never put an unsecured photo of yourself
online.
===========================
KrebsOnSecurity spent a good part of the past week working with Cisco to alert more than four dozen companies — many of them household names — about regular corporate WebEx conference meetings that lack passwords and are thus open to anyone who wants to listen in.
Department of Energy’s WebEx meetings.
At issue are recurring video- and audio conference-based meetings that companies make available to their employees via WebEx, a set of online conferencing tools run by Cisco. These services allow customers to password-protect meetings, but it was trivial to find dozens of major companies that do not follow this basic best practice and allow virtually anyone to join daily meetings about apparently internal discussions and planning sessions.
Many of the meetings that can be found by a cursory search within an organization’s “Events Center” listing on Webex.com seem to be intended for public viewing, such as product demonstrations and presentations for prospective customers and clients. However, from there it is often easy to discover a host of other, more proprietary WebEx meetings simply by clicking through the daily and weekly meetings listed in each organization’s “Meeting Center” section on the Webex.com site.
Some of the more interesting, non-password-protected recurring meetings I found include those from Charles Schwab, CSC, CBS, CVS, The U.S. Department of Energy, Fannie Mae, Jones Day, Orbitz, Paychex Services, and Union Pacific. Some entities even also allowed access to archived event recordings.
Cisco began reaching out to each of these companies about a week ago, and today released an all-customer alert (PDF) pointing customers to a consolidated best-practices document written for Cisco WebEx site administrators and users.
“In the first week of October, we were contacted by a leading security researcher,” Cisco wrote. “He showed us that some WebEx customer sites were publicly displaying meeting information online, including meeting Time, Topic, Host, and Duration. Some sites also included a ‘join meeting’ link.”
==========================
Quest Diagnostics Says All 12 Million Patients May Have Had
Financial, Medical, Personal Information Breached. It includes credit
card numbers and bank account information, according to a filing...
HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU NEED TO BE TOLD: "NEVER, EVER, GIVE TRUE
INFORMATION TO ANY COMPANY THAT USES A NETWORK OR MAKES YOU SIGN-IN
TO ANYTHING
ONLINE!"
https://khn.org/news/a-wake-up-call-on-data-collecting-smart-beds-and-sleep-apps/
==========================
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hackers-may-soon-be-able-to-tell-what-youre-typingjust-by-hearing-you-type-11559700120
https://sputniknews.com/science/201906051075646555-chinese-cyborg-future-chip/
https://www.emarketer.com/content/average-us-time-spent-with-mobile-in-2019-has-increased
https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-ransomware-20190603-story.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/447532-news-industry-joins-calls-for-more-scrutiny-of-big-tech
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-future-will-be-recorded-on-your-smart-speaker-1.1270598
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/9/robert-mueller-exploited-cell-phone-gps-track-trum/
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/the-unholy-alliance-between-dna-sites-and-facial-recognition/
Key Points
Google Gmail keeps a log of everything you buy.
Google says this is so you can ask Google Assistant about the status of an order or reorder something.
It also says you can delete this log by deleting the email, but three weeks after we deleted all email, the list is still there.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai
Google and other tech companies have been under fire recently for a variety of issues, including failing to protect user data, failing to disclose how data is collected and used and failing to police the content posted to their services.
Companies such as Google have embedded themselves in our lives with useful services including Gmail, Google Maps and Google Search, as well as smart products such as the Google Assistant which can answer our questions on a whim. The benefits of these tools come at the cost of our privacy, however, because while Google says that privacy should not be a “luxury good, ” it’s still going to great lengths to collect as much detail as possible about its users and making it more difficult than necessary for users to track what’s collected about them and delete it.
Here’s the latest case in point.
In May, I wrote up something weird I spotted on Google’s account management page. I noticed that Google uses Gmail to store a list of everything you’ve purchased, if you used Gmail or your Gmail address in any part of the transaction.
If you have a confirmation for a prescription you picked up at a pharmacy that went into your Gmail account, Google logs it. If you have a receipt from Macy’s, Google keeps it. If you bought food for delivery and the receipt went to your Gmail, Google stores that, too.
You get the idea, and you can see your own purchase history by going to Google’s Purchases page.
Google says it does this so you can use Google Assistant to track packages or reorder things, even if that’s not an option for some purchases that aren’t mailed or wouldn’t be reordered, like something you bought a store.
At the time of my original story, Google said users can delete everything by tapping into a purchase and removing the Gmail. It seemed to work if you did this for each purchase, one by one. This isn’t easy — for years worth of purchases, this would take hours or even days of time.
So, since Google doesn’t let you bulk-delete this purchases list, I decided to delete everything in my Gmail inbox. That meant removing every last message I’ve sent or received since I opened my Gmail account more than a decade ago.
Despite Google’s assurances, it didn’t work.
Like a horror movie villain that just won’t die
On Friday, three weeks after I deleted every Gmail, I checked my purchases list.
I still see receipts for things I bought years ago. Prescriptions, food deliveries, books I bought on Amazon, music I purchased from iTunes, a subscription to Xbox Live I bought from Microsoft -- it’s all there.
A list of my purchases Google pulled in from Gmail.
Todd Haselton | CNBC
Google continues to show me purchases I’ve made recently, too.
I can’t delete anything and I can’t turn it off.
When I click on an individual purchase and try to remove it — it says I can do this by deleting the email, after all — it just redirects to my inbox and not to the original email message for me to delete, since that email no longer exists.
So Google is caching or saving this private information somewhere else that isn’t just tied to my Gmail account.
When I wrote my original story, a Google spokesperson insisted this list is only for my use, and said the company views it as a convenience. Later, the company followed up to say this data is used to “help you get things done, like track a package or reorder food.”
But it’s a convenience I never asked for, and the fact that Google compiles and stores this information regardless of what I say or do is a bit creepy.
A spokesperson was not immediately available to comment on this latest development.
But it shows once again how tech companies often treat user privacy as a low-priority afterthought and will only make changes if user outrage forces their hand.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/11/google_assistant_voice_eavesdropping_creepy/
https://www.technowize.com/google-home-is-sending-your-private-recordings-to-google-workers/
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-malicious-apps-infect-million-android.html
https://archive.fo/RrnuL#selection-1489.0-1489.170
EVERYTHING IN AMERICA HAS BEEN HACKED OR SOON WILL BE:
In a country of just 7 million people, the scale of the hack means that just about every working adult has been affected.
"We should all be angry. ... The information is now freely available to anyone. Many, many people in Bulgaria already have this file, and I believe that it's not only in Bulgaria," said Genov, a blogger and political analyst. He knows his data was compromised because, though he's not an IT expert, he managed to find the stolen files online.
Microsoft says foreign hackers still actively targeting US political targets
The attack is extraordinary, but it is not unique.
Government databases are gold mines for hackers. They contain a huge wealth of information that can be "useful" for years to come, experts say. "You can make (your password) longer and more sophisticated, but the information the government holds are things that are not going to change," said Guy Bunker, an information security expert and the chief technology officer at Clearswift, a cybersecurity company. "Your date of birth is not going to change, you're not going to move house tomorrow," he said. "A lot of the information that was taken was valid yesterday, is valid today, and will probably be valid for a large number of people in five, 10, 20 years' time."
Data breaches used to be spearheaded by highly skilled hackers. But it increasingly doesn't take a sophisticated and carefully planned operation to break into IT systems. Hacking tools and malware that are available on the dark web make it possible for amateur hackers to cause enormous damage.A strict data protection law that came into effect last year across the European Union has placed new burdens on anyone who collects and stores personal data. It also introduced hefty fines for anyone who mismanages data, potentially opening the door for the Bulgarian government to fine itself for the breach.
Slack is resetting thousands of passwords after 2015 hack
Still, attacks against government systems are on the rise, said Adam Levin, the founder of CyberScout, another cybersecurity firm. "It's a war right now -- one we will win if we make cybersecurity a front-burner issue," he said. The notion that governments urgently need to step up their cybersecurity game is not new. Experts have been ringing alarm bells for years.
The US Department of Veterans Affairs suffered one of the first major data breaches in 2006, when personal data of more than 26 million veterans and military personnel were compromised. "And it was all, 'Oh, this is dreadful. We must do things to stop it.' ... And here we are, 13 years later, and an entire country's data has been compromised, and in between, there's been incidents of large swathes of citizen data being compromised in different countries," Bunker said. Out-of-date systems are often the problem. Some governments may have used private companies to manage the data they collected before the array of hacks and breeches brought their attention to cybersecurity. "In many cases, our data was sent to third-party contractors years ago," Levin said. "The way we looked at data management 10 years ago seems antiquated today, yet that old data is still out there being managed by third parties, using legacy systems."
Chinese spies stole NSA hacking tools, report finds
If the "old data" hasn't changed, it's still valuable to hackers.
The Bulgaria incident is concerning, said Desislava Krusteva, a Bulgarian privacy and data protection lawyer who advises some of the world's biggest tech companies on how to keep their clients' information safe.
"These kinds of incidents should not happen in a state institution. It seems like it didn't require huge efforts, and it's probably the personal data of almost all Bulgarian citizens," said Krusteva, a partner at Dimitrov, Petrov & Co., a law firm in Sofia.
The Bulgarian Commission for Personal Data Protection has said it would launch an investigation into the hack.
A National Revenue Agency spokesman would not comment on whether the data was properly protected.
"As there is undergoing investigation, we couldn't provide more details about reasons behind the hack," Communications Director Rossen Bachvarov said.
A 20-year-old cybersecurity worker has been arrested by the Bulgarian police in connection with the hack. The computer and software used in the attack led police to the suspect, according to the Sofia prosecutor's office.
The man has been detained, and the police seized his equipment, including mobile phones, computers and drives, the prosecutor's office said in a statement. If convicted, he could spend as long as eight years in prison.
US indicts two people in China over hacks
"It's still too early to say what exactly happened, but from political perspective, it is, of course, very embarrassing for the government," Krusteva said.
The embarrassment is made worse by the fact that this was not the first time the Bulgarian government was targeted. The country's Commercial Registry was brought down less than a year ago by an attack. "So, at least for a year, the Bulgarian society, politicians, those who are in charge of the country, they knew quite well about the serious cybersecurity problems in the government infrastructures," Genov said, "and they didn't do anything about it."
Hackers posted screenshots of the company's servers on Twitter and later shared the stolen data with Digital Revolution, another hacking group who last year breached Quantum, another FSB contractor.
This second hacker group shared the stolen files in greater detail on their Twitter account, on Thursday, July 18, and with Russian journalists afterward.
SEE PART TWO...
